This is completely not druid related. Whatsoever. Actually it’s only tangentially WoW related for that matter.

Last night I finally got footage of Valiona and Theralion to put together a guide video for the encounter (I actually got footage of Nef too – but we lost our add tank about 5% and I was summarily smooshed by the adds, so I canned the footage and figured I’d try next week…which pretty much turned out to be a huge mistake). I was pretty excited about it and had planned to work on the audio recording tonight when I got home from work. However, apparently Friday the 13th and my computer had different plans for me.

This morning when I went to log into my computer and check the forums before heading to the officer, my computer completely locked up. It let me log in just fine. But then everything froze. I was able to ctrl-alt-delete and select “task manager”, but once the selection was made everything froze again. So I restarted my machine.

Only it didn’t restart.

I got an error message telling me that it could not boot and that I needed to insert the boot disc and try again. Uh. Okay? So I simply attempted to restart my machine again. And got the same error message. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKK. This is NOT happening. It just can’t be. Mostly, because I can’t deal with it happening right now.

But it is.

I got Brade out of bed, as I started to panic, and stated “just so you know if this isn’t fixed when I get home, I’m pretty much going to lose it”. To which he gave me a look that could only say “are you fucking kidding me woman, I’m not a miracle worker here”. Which, you know, is fair. Because he’s not a miracle worker, and pretty much knows less about this shit than I do. So as I left the house for work, already 10 minutes later than I should have, he was lovingly unplugging SATA and power cables to my hard drives and plugging them back in to see if it was just something loose causing the problems.

It wasn’t.

And so he loaded my PC up into his car so I could come by and pick it up on my way home from work and deliver it to our local computer shop. Because there was no way I was going to be able to lug that monster alienware case down the stairs to get it to my car. Hell, I might not even make it from my car to the door – which would have resulted in me having to be a complete weenie and embarrassingly go in and ask one of the repair guys to come and fetch it from my car for me.

Of course, Brade, knowing that I’m pretty much a ticking bomb with the stress of the upcoming move, let me know that he’s going to try to make time to deliver my broken computer during his lunch for me. Which means that the computer guys can start diagnosing it faster. It also means that I don’t have to be that wimpy girl and fail at being able to move my own PC from point A to point B.

Now, my biggest fear is that my hard drive is fried. Not that I can’t replace it, because that’s really not going to be a huge deal. In fact, I can get a bigger, faster hard drive in its place, which would be cool. But rather because I haven’t backed up anything on that hard drive…ever. Yup, I’ve 250 gigs of un-backed up shit. You see, this PC didn’t agree with my ancient external hard drive, and I was pretty much too cheap/lazy to get a new external for back up purposes – and thus I have no external drive holding all my precious shit that I don’t want to lose. So if my hard drive is toast (which I’m really hoping isn’t the case), I’m going to have to pray that the geniuses at the computer shop and recover some of my data. I am also going to be swinging by costco tonight and picking up that 1tb external for seventy bucks that I’ve been looking at for the past two months and saying “you know, I really should pick one of these up in case something ever happens to my machine”.

But that? That’s not even the WORST of it. No, the worst of it is that in preparation for the move, I’ve already packed all of my back up discs and programs. Yes, they are now living in one of probably half a dozen different boxes. So if the issue is a kaput hard drive, I’m going to have to go unpack in order to get my machine set back up again. My windows discs, my office discs, photoshop, vegas, etc. And I’m going to have to redownload FRAPS and that program that found after searching google that let me extract and read .ogg files. Set up filezilla again so I can upload onto the server hosting the guild website – and pray I took good notes for which passwords went with which thing. Not to mention that I will have to re-install vent, which means trying to recall exactly wtf my administrator password is.

So, as you can see, pretty much just a huge fucking mess. That I pretty much can’t really deal with right now. I mean, obviously I can, but really? Not so much.

At least I’ve got a laptop that is almost as powerful as my desktop to work with in the interim? The silver lining, I suppose?

But it also means no Valiona video until the repair guys are done holding my machine hostage and I can get everything back up and running again. :(

/sigh

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12 responses to “ARGH!”

I had an impressive computer meltdown a couple years ago, right around the time we were packing up to move across the entire southern US (FL to AZ, driving the whole way). It was awful, I was so stressed. So, I know your pain. <3333333

I’m so sorry to hear this. I had the exact same thing happen to me a short while ago. Hard drive just completely died on me. Got home from work, we ate dinner like nothing was wrong then when i went to go raid and power on my PC…nothing. Dead. Lost everything on there. It was a good excuse to upgrade from XP to Windows 7 though so something good came of it I supose. Either way I know how bad it sucks

Yar, I will also be upgrading from windows Vista to Windows 7. I’m still debating if I’m going to miss anything enough to warrant spending the money to have someone recover it. Unfortunately it has all my screenshots and photoshop work on it, so I’m a bit torn on what to do on that front.

I will, however, be picking up an external drive tonight to store everything.

When I made the new computers for Lou & myself, I got a small SSD for Windows and WoW, and then we got large 2nd drives (1TB) for everything else. Something you might want to consider if you have to go the new drive route. SSDs are even cheaper now (we only got 80gb ones) and it makes booting really fast.

Plus, I also occasionally will copy my WTF/Interface folders to the 2nd drive as a backup, just in case something happens to the primary drive.

This is ultimately what I’ve decided to do. I’ll be grabbing a 120 gig SSD and then an external Hard Drive to store everything on, so I don’t end up in this prediciment again!

I usually put my Interface and WTF folder on a flash drive that I keep handy, but I’ve not done it in several months, which means it wasn’t done since 4.1 launched :( Actually, I’m not sure that I’ve done it since Cataclysm launched, so any power auras or mods I’ve added since then I’m going to have to reconfigure again. At least I didn’t lose my UI completely – I’m pretty sure a complete rebuild would have seen tears!

Ah moving. We just finished getting across the country from Maryland to Washington and boy are we glad to be done. Got into the new house yesterday, furniture will be delivered Tuesday. Thankfully both of our laptops behaved themselves for the trip or there would’ve been real trouble!

You don’t deserve all that Beru, i hope things’ll work out so you can get those vids out :) comp problems at the worst possible moment are horrible². i recently had a similar problem, sort of the same behaviour but due to my RAM being fried, still hoping that it won’t be your hard drive.. but it sounds likely. Don’t let it get you down too much!

You seem to have a loving and understanding husband (or is it bf?) next to you – important, that.

I wish my wife could be as caring about anything computer-related. Heck, my wife would welcome a fried computer which would result in her having some free time away from my raid nights :)

All jokes aside, you made no mention of it but I sincerely hope that you didn’t lose any personal stuff like pictures,videos,documents – now [i]those[/i] are irreplacable – fuck that stupid game, all of that can be found again eventually -

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